Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

‘Peter Abelard’, he wrote to the Pope, ‘is trying to make void the merit of Christian faith when he deems himself able by human reason to comprehend God altogether ... the man is great in his own eyes ... this scrutinizer of Majesty and fabricator of heresies.’

The minds of the two men were indeed utterly opposed—types of conflicting human thought in all ages. St. Bernard, in spite of his frank denunciations of the sins of the Church, was docile to the voice of her authority, and hated and feared the pride of the human intellect as the deadliest of all sins. Abelard, by nature inquisitive and sceptical, regarded his deft brain as a surgeon’s knife, given him to cut away diseased or worn-out tissues from the thought of his day in order to leave it healthier and purer.

As antagonists they were no match, for St. Bernard was infinitely the greater man, without any of the other’s petty vanity and worldliness to confuse the issue for which they struggled: he had behind him also the sympathy of mediaeval minds not as yet awakened to any spirit of inquiry, and so the Breton was driven into the retirement of a monk’s cell and his condemned works publicly burned.

One of his pupils, Peter Lombard, adopted his master’s methods without arousing the anger of the orthodox by any daring feats of controversy, and produced a Book of Sentences (sententiae = opinions) that became the text-book for scholasticism, just as the Decretum was the authority for students of Roman law. Without being a work of genius the Sentences cleared a pathway through the jungle of mediaeval thought for more original minds, while the discovery in the latter half of the twelfth century of several hitherto unknown works of Aristotle gave added zest to the researches of the ‘Schoolmen’. Greatest of all these ‘Schoolmen’ was Thomas Aquinas, ‘the Angelic Doctor’, as he has sometimes been called.

Aquinas was a Neapolitan of noble family, who ran away from home as a boy to join the Dominicans, an Order of wandering preachers of whose foundation we shall shortly speak. Thomas was recaptured and brought home by his elder brother, a noble at the court of Frederick II; but neither threats nor imprisonment could persuade the young novice to give up the life he had chosen. After a year he broke the bars of his window, escaped from Naples, and went to Cologne and Paris, where he studied theology, emerging from this education the greatest lecturer and teacher of his day. In his Summa Theologiae, his best-known book, he set forth his belief in man’s highest good as the chief thought of God, using both the commentaries of the Church Fathers and the works of Aristotle as quarries to provide the material for fashioning his arguments. Like Abelard, he believed in the voice of reason, but without any of the Breton’s probing scepticism. Human reason bridled by divine grace was the guide he sought to lead his pen through the maze of theology; and so clear and judicial were his methods, so brilliant the intellect that shone through his writings, that Aquinas became for later generations an authority almost equal to St. Augustine.

Mediaeval Faith

The intense preoccupation of mediaeval minds with theology and the importance attached to ‘right belief’ are the most striking mental characteristics of the period with which we are dealing. To-day we are inclined to judge a man by his actions rather than by his beliefs, to sum up a character as good or bad because its owner is generous or selfish, kind or cruel, brave or cowardly. In the twelfth or thirteenth centuries this would have seemed a wholly false standard. The ideal of conduct, for one thing, maintained by monks like St. Bernard of Clairvaux was so exalted that, to the ordinary men and women in an age of cruelty and fierce passions, a good life seemed impossible save for Saints. The sins and failings of the rest of the world received a very easy pardon except from ascetics; and it was generally felt that God in His mercy, through the intercession of the kindly Saints, would be compassionate to human weakness so long as the sinner repented, confessed, and clung to a belief in the teaching of the Church. This teaching, or ‘Faith’, declared to have been given by Christ to His Apostles, set forth in the writings of the Christian Fathers, gathered together in the Creeds and Sacraments defined by Church Councils, preached and expounded by the clergy and theologians, defended by the Pope, was the torch that could alone guide man’s wavering footsteps to the ‘City of God’.

‘Do you know what I shall gain,’ asked a French Count of the thirteenth century, ‘in that during this mortal life I have believed as Holy Church teaches? I shall have a crown in the Heavens above the angels, for the angels cannot but believe inasmuch as they see God face to face.’

Heresy—the refusal to accept the teaching of the Church—was the one unpardonable sin, a moral leprosy worse in mediaeval eyes than any human disease because it affected the soul, not the body, and the life of the soul was everlasting. The heretic must be suppressed, converted if possible, but if not, burned and forgotten like a diseased rag, lest his wrong beliefs should infect others and so lose their souls also eternally. To-day we know that neither suppression nor burnings can ultimately extinguish that independence of thought and spirit of inquiry that are as much the motive power of some human natures as the acceptance of authority is of others. Tolerance, and how far it can be extended to actions as well as beliefs, is one of the problems that the world is still studying. The towns and provinces, where the first battles were fought, are sown with the blood and ashes of those who neither sought nor offered the way of compromise as a solution.

Another of Abelard’s pupils, besides the orthodox Peter Lombard, was an Italian, Arnold of Brescia—in many ways a man of like intellect with his master, self-centred, restless, and ambitious. When he returned home from the University he at once took a violent part in the life of the Brescian commune, declaring publicly that the Church should return to the days of ‘apostolic poverty’, and urging the citizens to cast off the yoke of their bishop. Exiled from Italy by the anger of the Pope and clergy at his views he went again to Paris, where he taught in the University until by the King’s command he was driven away. He next found a refuge in Germany under the protection of a papal legate, who had known and admired him in earlier days; but this news aroused the furious anger of St. Bernard.